The long awaited Mice entry:
OK, if you've actually been waiting for this you're probably going to be disapointed.
For about 4 months we've had a very evasive and persistent mouse chewing up our stuff and then pooping on what's left behind. To some extent we're used to this as it's been kind of a chronic late fall/early winter situation since we moved into this house. I began to get irritated when the mouse got into the new drawers (all three of them) and pooped on everything in them. The first time this happened I got out the seven functional traps (we've actually worn some out and have some others that are used only for keeping Lucy off the furniture) baited them up with peanut butter and set them out. We got nothing for several weeks and the mice seemed to vanish for a while, the peanut butter got stale and dried out and the traps eventually got put away again.
Ironically as I'm writing this Sandy is washing dishes or something and she just set off a trap. There was only a minimal amount of swearing so I don't think it got her. Anyway...
After we got back from Ride the Rockies it became clear that the mice were just laying low waiting for their chance to have the run of the house. There was poop everywhere and lots of chewed up food items, including in the 3 drawers again. The traps came out again and this time I decided to freshen them up with a little chocolate syrup. At this point let me say that mice love chocolate but they seem unwilling to soil their pallets with something as common as Hershey's syrup over stale peanut butter.
This time we did get some action but every time a trap was triggered the mouse would somehow escape. There were at least 6 incidents of a trap being set off and no captured mouse. I think they were probably triggering them by running across them on their way to the chocolate chips.
By now I was starting to take this personally. I pride myself on being good at catching mice. One year when I worked at Sawbill I caught 63 mice (actually there were a couple of voles and a shrew included in that count) as part of a competition with another crew member (Chris McConn, he caught 61) so I think I have some idea what I'm doing.
One day while I was at work I got a call from Sandy who happened to be at home for some reason. She had just opened the cupboard and surprised a mouse using her apron as a rope ladder on it's way to score some brown sugar. She cleverly grabbed the apron and took it and the mouse outside where she deposited it into the recycling bin. She was very proud of herself and proceeded to give me some shit about how she was doing better with the mice than me. I kept my mouth shut but I was kind of worried about what we were going to do with the mouse in the longer term. I was pretty sure she wouldn't be the one to "dispose" of it and I wasn't sure how I might go about that.
Well we didn't need to worry about it, the mouse took care of that dilemma for us. Pretty soon I got another phone call, it's Sandy and she tells me that she went out to check on the mouse (don't ask me why) and it seems to have gotten cut in half. Well it turns out she could only see half of the mouse because the other half of it had made it's way through a dime sized hole in the bottom of the recycling bin. She figured this all out while she was on the phone with me. "It's still alive but it seems to be stuck" she said. This was actually irritating to me because now not only do I have to figure out what to do with a live mouse, now it's a live mouse that's wearing our recycling bin like a tutu. As I ride my bike home from work I'm picturing using scissors to extricate the mouse from the hole, not a pleasent mental image.
As it turns out I need not have worried because the mouse again was looking out for my best interests. By the time I got home the mouse had sucessfully traversed the entire hole and was nowhere to be found. It did however leave it's calling card (a turd) to let us know we had been outsmarted again.
So at this point I'm at a bit of a loss, it appears that we may be dealing with special forces mice or maybe insurgent/Taliban mice or something. I don't know exactly, but it's frustrating to think about relative brain size and not be able to overcome this problem.
One night I'm laying in bed sweating (because of the weather not the mice) half asleep but half awake. Somehow I started thinking about old Warner Bros. cartoons and how the mice were always after cheese. Eventually I dozed off. The next morning I remembered my thoughts about the cheese and disregarded them as too cartooney to actually work. Well after another week or so of fruitles efforts I decided to give it a shot. I gathered up all the traps, sat down with some toothpicks and cleaned out all the coagulated old peanut butter and loaded those babies up with some Kraft American Deli-Deluxe.
That night we heard one of the traps go off, another false alarm we thought but then there was a rattling sound. I went out to investigate and suffice it to say there was a "not dead yet" mouse in the trap, I finished him off and went back to bed with a feeling of accomplishment. The next morning after I finished my Lucky Charms I scooted back from the table and noticed that another of the traps had been set off but there was no mouse. I figured commando mouse had disarmed this one before getting caught in the other trap. While I was retrieving the trap so I could reset it I noticed a tail sticking out from under the cabinet. Feeling extremely apprehensive I grabbed the tail (expecting an ambush or something) and pulled out another mouse. It didn't have any obvious injuries, but upon closer inspection it did have a bit of a dent in the side of it's head. I suspect he tried to pull out a split second too late and managed to avoid getting grabbed but caught a lethal blow to the side of the head.
The next night we got one more. He didn't pull off anything fancy like the other two he just had his head smashed in the trap, maybe he was still in training or something.
It felt like such a accomplishment that I actually took a couple pictures of the dead mice that I was going to post here, but after writing all this I feel like it might be kind of gratuitious so I'll leave it up to your imagination.
Instead here's a nice picture of a butterfly that was in our back yard this afternoon.